CloudTurbine can significantly benefit from an SSD hard drive. The much faster seek-time of an SSD (vs spinning disk) helps CloudTurbine quickly fetch data. This is particularly true when your CloudTurbine source is comprised of numerous small files.
CloudTurbine applications often have a trade-off between real-time responsiveness and data storage efficiency (either number or size of output data files). Many applications have a ZIP mode option which supports efficient data storage. There may be a “flush interval” option which specifies how often to write a ZIP’ed block of data to disk. Making flush interval longer will result in fewer output files but create less of a real-time experience for downstream viewers.
Applications may offer additional options which affect real-time responsiveness and data storage efficiency. For example, CTstream supports a “change detect” mode where frames are only saved to the output source when there is a change in the captured region; if no change occurs in the captured region, a new image is not saved to CloudTurbine. CTstream also includes an “image quality” setting which will affect the size of the output image files. CTtext includes a manual flush mode where data is only flushed to disk when the user clicks on a provided Flush button.
CloudTurbine developers should be aware of the affect such options will have on users and clearly present the trade-offs to users in the user interface or documentation.
